You sir, just earned a tinfoil hat. While I have no particular love for Bluecoat (they're competitors in another field), you're assuming things based on what you think to be the case. Claiming that others are misinformed simply because it doesn't fit your mental image is rather silly.

There's only so and so much time in a workday. Spending it on going over phone-home in detail and sending across sensitive information in the first place? Not so useful.

(We also do phone home. Aggregates only, nothing sensitive. It usually makes very little sense to go fucking with your customers or risking their sensitive data, so there's no reason to send anything else.)

Actually, no.

If you use different compression algorithms, sure, it'd yield a different result. But if you rip a CD with default settings in whatever music manager - say iTunes, for posterity - you'd end up with the same file hash as the next guy that did the same thing with the same software. Digital data, et al.

This is actually not the case with dedicated solutions for this sort of thing (yes, they exist. No, they're not cheap), commonly used for annual general meetings by large corporate entities. A normal wireless network will hold up rather nicely as long as a) the AP's cope with the # of connected clients and b) whatever service you're pushing data to isn't too chatty.

It depends entirely on how many polls you need to perform in what time span. The way we do it (non-profit NGO) is by a simple web form - there's a number of terminals available for people who doesn't bring their own laptop/phone, and those who do bring their own, can use it. Performing a poll with 100 people takes ~2 minutes - but it'd depend on the number of people with their own equipment and the number of terminals at hand, naturally.

Avoid doing it by hand, if at all possible. Counting sucks and people are way, way more focused if they can get the outcome almost right away rather than after n minutes.

Damn, good sir. You beat me to posting that very sentiment. Utterly pointless book review.

Think bigger. The US has a net export of culture (if I may call it that for the sake of the argument) - Disney is one rather marked example, but say Hollywood in general and ignore all other sources of culture for the time being. There's still a metric fuckwad of products out there in the world with Mickey and Donald images on them. Some are even produced by outfits in places where you actually pay royalties. Disney series - even old ones from the 80's - are broadcast in quite a few countries, also generating royalties. There's still an interest in the older Disney characters (yes, the more recent shows obviously wouldn't be free-for-all even if the characters went free-for-all, but nothing would stop other firms from making their own shows with the same characters)

This translates into a steady stream of revenue coming into the country from the rest of the world. Mickey & Donald. Batman. Superman. Hell, even Popeye. Money translates, sooner or later, into jobs. Either directly in the corporate entity that owns the IP, or by the spending of said money. All this is somewhat tangible. The benefits of not extending copyright aren't.

You (I'm not a resident of the US myself) need to provide some good, solid arguments backed up by good, solid numbers in order to see any sort of change here. That's the tricky part.

If you extend copyright: Some number of jobs (thousands, tens of thousands?) saved. IP exports generating US revenue. No real downside other than "What, you extended it again?" and no clear loser.

No wonder they extend it. They have no real case against doing so.

I'm sure it's not in your opinion, but you're sadly oversimplifying or ignoring every use case and ignoring the drivers behind QoS in general. If you want something simplistic and turnkey, there's certainly products out there. Netequalizer springs to mind.

But hey, let's throw in a few simple examples:

HTTP downloads vs. Flash video streamed over HTTP. One is decidedly interactive (even if buffering certainly helps), the other one is decidedly non-interactive (even if faster = neater, naturally).

SIP telephony vs. SIP videoconferencing. Agnosticism per your definition would make the algorithm punish the SIP videocon.

Or, let's take an even simpler example: P2P. Rather than a few very hungry connections, you get a large number of connections pushing less data per connection.

One can always argue that service providers should provide enougb bandwidth so that they won't even have to prioritize data the first place. Nice in theory, hard (or simply uneconomic) in practice. Take a cable provider - with a limited upstream bandwidth per channel, you need some sort of fairness. Simple per-plug fairness works to some extent, but you don't really want to punish the puny amount of upstream data your average HTTP request would generate just because the same user is P2P'ing like there's no tomorrow. Makes for a bad user experience.

When we get to wireless, it gets even messier with the limited and shared upstream and downstream.

I could go on for a whie, but I believe the point has been made. It's not a case of "You simply XYZ" at all.

Yeah, the web went downhill back when they started embedding images in the pages. Who, I mean, who would want to see GRAPHICS in the middle of your CLEAN, SEMANTIC INFORMATION? It doesn't WORK and it's an OUTRAGE!